"Good Night, Moon"

New moon

0.2 day old moon

0.1 percent lit

Yes, that is a new moon in a daytime sky.

February 22, 2020

Sunday’s moon phase is known as Hilo. This will be an excellent night to go fishing, however an unproductive night to plant.

Can't the federal government help the doctor shortage in Hawaii? The doctor and nurse shortage was one of the agenda items within the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. There was funding established to promote the education of future needs for doctors and other health care professionals. What happened to that funding?

February 23, 2020

UH research shows (click here) that the doctor shortage is the highest on the neighbor islands. This is the reason why the UH John A. Burns School of Medicine is interested in having a medical school on Maui.

There’s a bill in the legislature asking for a $1.4-million for the medical school. If funding is approved in 2020, the first class could start in July 2021.

JABSOM reports research shows more than 80 percent of doctors who attend medical school and train in-state end up practicing there too.

UH said Hawaii is short approximately 820 physicians. Maui County is in need of 153 doctors....

After the marriage to Michelle and his role in Chicago's community; his service as a US Senator had many achievements.

During his first three years in the Senate, (click here) Obama focused on issues such as lobbying and ethics reform, veterans’ benefits, energy, nuclear nonproliferation, and government transparency. From his seat on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Obama secured disability pay for veterans and advocated greater services and assistance for returning service members who served in Iraq. As a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Obama sought to reinvigorate a national dialogue about developing more–energy–efficient vehicles and alternative energy sources. On the Foreign Relations Committee, he worked with then–Chairman Richard Lugar of Indiana to initiate a new round of nonproliferation efforts designed to find and secure nuclear and conventional weapons around the world.

Barak Hussein Obama went on to become the first Black President of the USA. He was instrumental in recovering the USA economy from it's darkest days of 2008. His presidency would last eight years with movement to secure the future for the children of the USA. He having two beautiful daughters realized the importance of education and heritage including leaving the Earth intact for generations to come.

After a remarkable presidency, President Obama needs a home for his library.

The Obama Library (click here) is being held up by federal issues.

January 27, 2020
By Jay Kozlarz

...The city hopes to conclude the review process this summer, (click here) according to a timeline shared by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. Until these processes are completed and any outstanding issues resolved, construction on the center cannot begin.

Federal agencies haven’t been the only obstacle standing in the Obama Center’s path. In 2018, a local nonprofit environmental group called Protect Our Parks filed a federal lawsuit against the $500 million development, claiming that transferring public land to a private entity for private use is prohibited by law. A judge later dismissed the suit, but that decision could be appealed....

President Obama needs to begin work on this Presidential Library.

Chicago’s African American community (click here) has had a lasting impact on our culture and history. The city’s first permanent settler was a black man from Haiti, who is now honored with a downtown bridge and a renowned cultural museum. African Americans would continue to shape the face of Chicago and the nation, from the Great Migration to President Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park.

Today, Chicago is home to thriving African American communities in neighborhoods all across the city. Bronzeville and Hyde Park are two areas where black heritage is proudly on display, from family-owned restaurants to vibrant works of art. Here’s where you can experience African American culture in Chicago....

There is a new mayor in Chicago and the opposition to President Obama's Library has to conclude. No one values parks of all kinds than me. President Obama's library includes natural settings. I am confident he will value the park. That plan has a lot of green in it's planning. Can it get real already?

February 20, 2019
By Jennifer Schuessler

The Obama Presidential Center (click here) promises to be a presidential library like no other.

The four-building, 19-acre “working center for citizenship,” set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill.

But the center, which will cost an estimated $500 million, will also differ from the complexes built by Barack Obama’s predecessors in another way: It won’t actually be a presidential library.

In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records. Instead, the Obama Foundation will pay to digitize the roughly 30 million pages of unclassified paper records from the administration so they can be made available online.

And the entire complex, including the museum chronicling Mr. Obama’s presidency, will be run by the foundation, a private nonprofit entity, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers the libraries and museums for all presidents going back to Herbert Hoover....

The FSB is the financial planning arm of the G20.

Michael R. Bloomberg (click here) is Chair of the Task Force, which includes users and providers of disclosures from a wide range of backgrounds. The members of the Task Force, who are drawn from a wide range of industries and countries from around the globe, finalised the recommendations after extensive public engagement and consultation, including public consultation on a draft of the recommendations in December 2016. Once implemented the recommendations will facilitate consistent, comparable, reliable, clear and efficient climate-related disclosures by companies. The recommendations apply broadly to financial and non-financial firms.

The TCFD developed four recommendations on climate-related financial disclosures that are applicable to organisations. The recommendations are structured around four thematic areas:

• Governance: The organisation’s governance around climate-related risks and opportunities.
• Strategy: The actual and potential impacts of climate-related risks and opportunities on the organisation’s businesses, strategy, and financial planning.
• Risk Management: The processes used by the organisation to identify, assess, and manage climate-related risks.
• Metrics and Targets: The metrics and targets used to assess and manage relevant climate-related risks and opportunities.

In September 2018 the TCFD published a survey of disclosures by over 1,700 firms from diverse sectors with broad geographical representation. It found that:

• The majority of the firms surveyed disclose information aligned with at least one of the TCFD recommended disclosures.
• While many companies describe climate-related risks and opportunities, few disclose the financial impact of climate change on the company.
• A minority of companies disclose forward-looking climate targets or the resilience of their strategies under different climate-related scenarios, including a 2°C or lower scenario, which is a key area of focus for the Task Force. 
• Disclosures vary widely across industries. For example, more non-financial companies reported their climate-related metrics and targets; than did financial companies. However, financial companies were more likely to disclose how they had embedded climate risk into overall risk management.
• Disclosures are often made in sustainability reports or spread across financial filings, annual and sustainability reports.

The FSB has asked the Task Force to publish a further status report in September 2020.                  

Who could resist the beauty, personality, wisdom and talent of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson?

In 1989, (click here) Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson went on a date to watch Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. 27 years later and their first date has just been made into a film called Southside With You. In homage to the world’s most famous couple, we thought we’d bring you a collection of photographs documenting the love story of the current President and First Lady of the United States of America.

The pair first met when Michelle was working as a marketing and intellectual property associate in the Chicago offices of law firm Sidley Austin. In 1989 she was assigned as an adviser to a summer intern from Harvard Law. His name was Barack Obama, and the rest, as they say, is history. They dated for three years before getting married in 1992, and these pictures highlight some of our favorite moments of The Obama’s love story since that first movie date at the Harper Theater in Chicago....   

This is trouble, this is very big trouble. It doesn't get better from here if nothing is done to end the climate crisis.

...High temperatures affect river levels (click here) in many ways. Coupled with earlier snow melt, they lead to a longer growing season, which means more days of water demand from plants. Higher temperatures also increase daily plant water use and evaporation from water bodies and soils. In sum, as it warms, the atmosphere draws more water, up to 4 percent more per degree Fahrenheit from all available sources, so less water flows into the river. These findings also apply to all semi-arid rivers in the American Southwest, especially the Rio Grande....














Lake Mead supplies 25 million people. (click here)

The construction of Glen Canyon Dam in 1964 (click here) created Lake Powell. Both are located in north-central Arizona near the Utah border. Lake Powell acts as a holding tank for outflow from the Colorado River Upper Basin States: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

The water stored in Lake Powell is used for recreation, power generation and delivering water to the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona, and Nevada....

...As climate change (click here) disrupts historical patterns of rainfall and temperature, the Colorado River has not been faring well, and it's getting even increasingly unlikely that the river will reach the sea again. A paper published this week in Science reports that the river's flow has been declining by an alarming 9.3 percent for every 1°C of warming—and that declining snow levels are the main culprit for this dramatic decline....

I can't believe this man was not on anyone's radar. Communities. President of the USA. Makes sense to me.

July 7, 2008
By Serge Kovaleski

Barack Obama at the Developing Communities Project, 2004.

The year was 1985 and Gerald Kellman, (click here) a community organizer, was interviewing an applicant named Barack Obama to work in the demoralized landscape of poor neighborhoods on this city’s South Side. He liked the young man’s intelligence, motivation and acutely personal understanding of how it felt to be an outsider. He also remembers that Mr. Obama drove a hard bargain.

“He challenged me on whether we could teach him anything,” Mr. Kellman recalled. “He wanted to know things like ‘How are you going to train me?’ and ‘What am I going to learn?’ ”

Mr. Obama’s three-year stretch as a grass-roots organizer has figured prominently, if not profoundly, in his own narrative of his life. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Obama called it “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,” an education that he said was “seared into my brain.” He devoted about one-third of the 442 pages in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” to chronicling that Chicago organizing period.

In recent days, Mr. Obama has imbued those years with even greater significance, invoking them last week as inspiration for his plan to deliver social services through religious organizations. He told a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church on Saturday that as a community organizer he “let Jesus Christ into my life” and “I dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works."...

Part of the reason Chicago was a magnet to the first African American president is because of the long lived African American population that succeeded after leaving the southern states. It was called the "Great Migration." If there was one place Barak Hussein Obama would find a foothold into public service it would be Chicago. Indeed, he did.

January 16, 2020

Obama home in Hyde Park (click here)

The Great Migration (click here) was the relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from about 1916 to 1970. Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many blacks headed north, where they took advantage of the need for industrial workers that arose during the First World War. During the Great Migration, African Americans began to build a new place for themselves in public life, actively confronting racial prejudice as well as economic, political and social challenges to create a black urban culture that would exert enormous influence in the decades to come....

February 21, 2020 
By Melissa Gaskill

Texas (click here) designated the mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) as official state bird in 1927 (Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 8, 40th Legislature).

Bastrop is for the birds. (click here) The Central Texas town, along with Dallas, Houston, and Port Aransas, are among the first certified Bird Cities in Texas. The certification from Audubon Texas and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department recognizes these communities for undertaking community engagement, habitat management, and threat reduction for birds.

It comes at a time of growing scientific evidence of stress on our feathered friends. Scientists recently estimated that since 1970, North America lost more than one in four birds, or nearly three billion total. The causes include pesticide use, insect declines, climate change, outdoor cats, and glass skyscrapers (birds are killed when flying into reflective glass). Migratory species also deal with changing conditions along their routes and in winter habitats. Audubon’s Survival by Degrees report says that two-thirds of North American birds face greater risk of extinction due to increasing temperatures globally.

By preserving green spaces, Bird Cities help people, too. Humans enjoy better health and well-being around nature. According to TPWD, bird-friendly habitat increases property values and helps control insects. Plus, the designation provides economic benefits to communities by helping them attract more of the state’s 2.2 million bird watchers....

Was no one watching this man's career besides Michelle?

Febraury 6, 1990
By Fox Butterfield

The Harvard Law Review, (click here) generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.

The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.

''The fact that I've been elected shows a lot of progress,'' Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ''It's encouraging.

''But it's important that stories like mine aren't used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don't get a chance,'' he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment....

It was going to happen. It was inevitable. With a heritage of overachievers in his parents, there was no doubt where Barak Hussein Obama was going to find national influence.

Pioneers of  the American Park Movement (click here)

Central Park, NYC, 1866

In 1857, Calvert Vaux, a rising young architect from London, asked Frederick Law Olmsted to join him in preparing an entry for the Central Park competition. While the park was being constructed according to their winning "Greensward" plan, Olmsted left New York, first for Washington and then for California. It took several years for Vaux to convince his friend to return East and join him in leading the nascent urban park movement that Central Park had spawned. In 1865, the reunited partners took up the design of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, their most fully evolved example of pastoral landscape as urban park. Five years later, they prepared the initial proposal for parks and parkways in Buffalo. It was the first plan for an interconnected park system to be implemented by an American city. Other places that sought the partners' advice during the post-Civil War years were Albany, NY, Newark, NJ, and Chicago and Riverside, IL. The latter is regarded as the country's first major suburban residential community.

Along with landscape projects he undertook with Olmsted, Vaux had a parallel career as an architect. He designed many country and suburban houses that displayed sensitive rapport with nature. Most of his early works of this type appeared in his book Villas and Cottages, which came out in 1857. Especially notable were his designs for bridges and other structures that embellished the parks that he and Olmsted laid out. The Bow Bridge and Bethesda Terrace in Central Park are most well known. He was also responsible for imaginative architectural features in Prospect Park and the Buffalo parks....

November 4, 2019

By Louis Sahagun

At the urging of a controversial team of advisors, (click here) the Trump administration is mulling proposals to privatize national park campgrounds and further commercialize the parks with expanded Wi-Fi service, food trucks and even Amazon deliveries at tourist camp sites.

Leaders of the Interior Department’s “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee say these changes could make America’s national parks more attractive to a digitally minded younger generation and improve the quality of National Park Service facilities amid a huge maintenance backlog. As part of its plan, the committee calls for blacking out senior discounts at park campgrounds during peak holiday seasons.

“Our recommendations would allow people to opt for additional costs if they want, for example, Amazon deliveries at a particular campsite,” said Derrick Crandall, vice chairman of the committee and a counselor with the nonprofit National Park Hospitality Assn. “We want to let Americans make their own decisions in the marketplace.”

But the group’s proposals face angry opposition from conservation organizations and senior citizen advocates, who call them a transfer of public assets to private industry, including businesses led by executives appointed to the Outdoor Advisory Committee....

February 13, 2020

Honolulu, Hawaii - The Manoa home (click here) where former President Barack Obama grew up is up for sale!

Obama lived in the University Avenue home from 1964 to 1967 — starting when he was just 3 years old.

His mom was going to school at the University of Hawaii at Manoa during that time.
It has four bedrooms and three bathrooms.
The last time the home was on the market was in 2006 and sold for $1.3 million.
After a few renovations, it’s now listed at $2.2 million.

It must have been nice growing up in Hawaii. Both Ann Dunham and the former president knew the strength of love from a family. President Obama's grandparents cared about their daughter as well as their grandson in a perfectly wonderful place to live.

May 11, 2012
By Amy Bingham

She (Ann Dunham) lived in five states (click here) and three countries text: Ann Dunham's family moved five times before Ann, or Stanley, as she was called in her childhood, turned 18, bouncing from Wichita, Kans., to California to Texas to Seattle and, finally, to Hawaii.

As an adult Dunham adopted her parents' knack for nomadism, splitting most of her adult life between Hawaii and Indonesia, and briefly taking up residence in Pakistan, where she helped establish a microfinance program for women.

Her son, on the other hand, took the opposite approach, putting down roots in Chicago and firmly planting himself and his family in the U.S.

"We've created stability for our kids in a way that my mom didn't do for us," Obama told Time magazine during his 2008 presidential campaign. "My choosing to put down roots in Chicago and marry a woman who is very rooted in one place probably indicates a desire for stability that maybe I was missing."...

How does 14C form? Mostly from cosmic rays.

Primary cosmic rays are dominantly protons (H nuclei-- GeV-- much energy associated with them).
Secondary when protons enter into the upper atmosphere they produce neutrons, which have high enough energies to split off portions of small nuclei In the upper atmosphere where there is a lot of 14N, 14N is hit by a neutron which knocks off a proton to form 14C [14N(n,p)14C].
The amount of 14C is a function of the number of neutrons which is dependent upon the amount of primary protons which enter the upper atmosphere.
It is possible to determine the amount of anthropogenic methane is being emitted from drilling and fracking. It is a lot and it needs to stop.
19 February 2020By Carly Casella
Tiny bubbles of ancient air (click here) trapped in ice cores from Greenland suggest we've been seriously overestimating the natural cycle of methane, while vastly undervaluing our own terrible impact.

Methane is an 'invisible climate menace' - roughly 30 times more potent as a heat-trapper than carbon dioxide  - and while some of this atmospheric gas is produced naturally, new research indicates humans are responsible for far more of it than we thought until now.

Before the industrial revolution, when humans began to extract and burn fossil fuels on the regular, natural methane emissions were an order of magnitude smaller than current estimates, the study suggests....

The original investigation appears in "Nature" on 19 February 2020 (click here) The facts have been plain for some time now, the natural emissions of methane from Earth is far lower if not completely absent from that of the emissions of anthropogenic sources.

The leaks need to stop NOW and the drilling and cracking have to be concluded as the highest source of methane in the troposphere today.

December 12, 2019
By Jonah M. Kessel and Hiroko Tabuchi

Immense amounts of methane (click here) are escaping from oil and gas sites nationwide, worsening global warming, even as the Trump administration weakens restrictions on offenders....

April 8, 2008
By Jonathan Martin

Stanley Ann Dunham loved this area but moved to attend college in Hawaii, marrying Obama's father.

For four years on Mercer Island, (click here) Stanley Ann Dunham impressed her high-school classmates with a wickedly sharp wit. She was an “intellectual rebel” with a fledgling beatnik sensibility that would eventually take her around the globe.

But shortly after high-school graduation in 1960 she vanished from the Seattle area, and would have been little more than a foggy memory to most — if not for a son she had just a year later: Barack Obama.

Now that Obama’s unique personal history has become part of his rising political profile, his mother’s formative years in the Pacific Northwest are a little-noticed chapter. Even Obama glosses over the chapter in a single line in his best-selling biography.

Dunham, who died of ovarian cancer in 1995, is described as the “most dominant figure” in Obama’s life. Obama’s half-sister says Dunham remembered her teen years on Mercer Island so fondly that she wanted to attend college in Seattle. Instead, her parents took her after high school to Hawaii, where Obama was born.

“Her life showed a deep respect for intellectual rigor and perhaps an uncommon sense of learning,” said Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who lives in Hawaii....

20 February 2020

December 12, 2019
By Pete Cobus

Muay Littlepig (left) (click here) had notably posted videos about the failure to adequately address the widespread damage in the southern province of Attapeu resulting from the collapse of a dam in July 2018 

A 30-year-old Laotian blogger (click here) has been imprisoned for five years for questioning the adequacy of the government's response to deadly flooding in the country's south this fall.

In September, Tropical Storm Podul and Tropical Depression Kajiki dumped an estimated 40 centimeters of rain across Laos' six southern provinces, killing at least 19 people and displacing an estimated 100,000, according to the United Nations and ASEAN humanitarian and disaster relief agencies.

The Vientiane Times put the death toll at 28, and international media reported that flooding also damaged hospitals and schools, and destroyed hundreds of roads and nearly 100 bridges.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said video blogger Houayheuang Xayabouly, known online as Muay Littlepig, posted a video to Facebook on September 12 drawing attention to what she described as a negligent government response to the disaster in her native Champasak and neighboring Salavan provinces.

As of Thursday, the video had been viewed more than 172,000 times....

"Mauy, the conscience of Laotian Society" (click here)

By Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal and Adam Bemma

The imprisonment of Houayheuang "Muay" Xayabouly, (click here) a young female Lao environmentalist turned internet activist who simply asked for help for flood victims, should be a matter of deep concern to the international community.

On Sept 5, 2018, Muay used her 17-minute-long Facebook Live broadcast to counter the official narrative of the government -- and state-run media -- on the 2018 dam collapse in southern Laos.

After speaking up for the flood victims, she found herself arrested and was sent to jail last year.

Her Facebook Live video was viewed 150,000 times and shared 2,244 times....

President Obama's father was ambitious, well read and wanted a greater education in the USA. It is to our benefit he came here.

June 18, 2016
By Rachel L. Swarns

The archivist stumbled (click here) across the file in a stack of boxes on the second floor of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The yellowing letters inside dated back more than half a century, chronicling the dreams and struggles of a young man in Kenya.

He was ambitious and impetuous, a 22-year-old clerk who could type 75 words a minute and translate English into Swahili. But he had no money for college. So he pounded away on a typewriter in Nairobi, pleading for financial aid from universities and foundations across the Atlantic.

His letters would help change the course of American history.“It has been my long cherished ambition to further my studies in America,” he wrote in 1958. His name was Barack Hussein Obama, and his dispatches helped unleash a stream of scholarship money that carried him from Kenya to the United States. There, he fathered the child who would become the nation’s first black president, only to vanish from his son’s life a few years after his birth.

In 2013, the Schomburg Center invited President Obama to see the newly discovered documents, which included nearly two dozen of his father’s letters, his transcripts from the University of Hawaii and Harvard University, and references from professors, advisers and supporters. Nearly three years later, as Mr. Obama celebrates his last Father’s Day in the White House, the center is still waiting for a response....

“I was born in a small village in Central Nyanza. My father earned the living for the family by being a cook in European homes.”

BARACK OBAMA SR. WROTE IN 1959

It is Sunday Afternoon and Black History Month

February 18, 2020
By Rachel Mcrady

Michelle Obama (click here) appears to be on the Jennifer Lopez track, because the former first lady seriously hasn't aged a day since her teenage years.

In a new throwback pic, the wife of Barack Obama shared her prom photo -- sans the former president."

Throwing it back to my 1982 prom night and this pink satin, polka-dotted dress," Michelle captioned the shot, which features her in an epic wicker throne rocking an '80s prom dress with a thigh-high slit as her tuxedo-clad date stands to the side.

Turns out, the mother of two is sharing the prom pic for a good cause.

"If you're a student or teacher join the #PromChallenge with @WhenWeAllVote and @MTV and tell us what your school is doing to register students to vote -- you could get a free prom for your school!" Michelle added in the caption. "Learn more at prom.mtv.com. You can also help me spread the word by posting your prom photo with #PromChallenge."...

Hail to the Chief (click here for official website of President Barak Hussein Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."